The rolling news reports of events as they unfolded in Paris transformed the violence into the spectacle of a reality TV show, where viewers were able to root for whoever they saw as the good guys. This seems to have manifested on a cultural divide and exposed the growing fascist tendencies on both sides.

We know the names of the victims and the three attackers in Paris last week, we don't know the names of the many who have died as so-called collateral damage - a term expressly designed to deny intent and absolve those concerned from any responsibility for the deaths they have caused - in the efforts to maintain a system that is fundamentally flawed.

The fault line between two cultures with historical differences and each voicing claims to exclusivity has been exacerbated by the visibility of inequality between the two, and this has led to frictions where they rub against one another.

Pouring gasoline on the sparks that are produced is the glorification of violence and the fetishization of guns by the dominant popular culture and its imitators. In olden days, honor could be won and a name made on the battlefield. Today this mentality has been transferred to gang culture, when, for those facing a dead-end future, violence has become both a means of retribution for the perceived injustices of life and an act of existential vanity: I kill, therefore I am.

This mentality of disaffected young people who see no hope of a better future except through crime and the "family" of the gang has been easily manipulated by the brainwashing of cult leaders who use them as tools to further their own perverted pursuit of power and glory by promising them a life and death that has significance - for 15 minutes at least.

In this way the celebrity killer has mutated into the terrorist as celebrity, and the response to this seems to depend on situation and perception.

The author is a writer with China Daily. hannayrichards@chinadaily.com.cn